Bill Costs Squeeze the Spread, But Bright Copper Holds at $6.45

Come close to the counter, friends, and mind the caged bear — he grows restless when the ledgers of Shanghai are read aloud. The men at the Metals Market tell us today that bill cost erodes the price spread dividends, and that even the coming of peak season shall not break the great stalemate between supply and demand. In plainer speech: the financiers have found that the little arbitrage they hoped to pocket has been nibbled away by the cost of carrying paper, and no autumn rush of buyers looks likely to shift the deadlock. The market sits, arms folded, like two wrestlers of equal weight.

And yet — mark this well — our own honest #1 Bare Bright holds near $6.45 the pound. Let the paper-men fret over their spreads and their financing charges; the red metal in your hands does not much care for their arithmetic. A stalemate on the exchange is no famine in the scrap yard. When the traders cannot agree, the metal simply waits, patient as ever, for the world to remember it cannot do without her.

For it cannot. I have driven my name into a hundred thousand copper cents in my day, passed hand to hand across every bar in New England, and I tell you no substance has served mankind so faithfully. Consider the still — my favorite subject, and the truest testament to copper's genius. From the monastery alembics of the old monks to the moonshiner's coiled worm in the Appalachian hollow, the distiller has trusted copper and copper alone. Why? Because the red metal reaches into the rising vapor and pulls out the sulfur and the foul volatiles that would otherwise poison the dram. Your stainless kettle cannot do it — it is deaf to the chemistry. Every clean whiskey, every bright brandy, every honest rum owes its sweetness to copper's quiet labor.

Nor does her work end at the pot still. She is the wire that carries lightning into your parlor, the pipe that brings clean water to your basin, the bottom of the good cook's pan, the green roof weathering over the church. She turns the electric motors and now feeds the great humming data-halls and the silent electric carriages of this modern age. A metal so demanded does not stay idle long, whatever the stalemate says.

So when the exchange reports a truce between buyer and seller, I counsel patience. Sell your Bare Bright, your #2, your bright wire and your yellow brass at a fair figure, and know the demand is only holding its breath. Copper always finds the next thirsty still, the next dark socket, the next line waiting for current.

Keep it bright, keep it dry, and let no man tell you the people's metal has lost its shine.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins